The future of sports: The square-dot game

I was watching the State of Origin tonight, just because I was flipping through tv channels and it happened to be the only thing worth watching. Watching sports is something that I rarely do, especially alone. Usually it is to connect with other friends who are totally into it. I occasionally play touch football so I am somewhat aware of the gist of the game. I found that as I kept watching the game I became considerably engrossed in it, without really knowing too much about what was happening. As I always do during such engrossing moments, I started thinking about what I was watching. In the midst of some tackle or try I devised an interesting thought experiment for rugby (which can of course be extended to other sports as well, but rugby is simplistic enough for such an analysis).

I noticed that the players moved in fairly deterministic movements. You have the defensive line and the offensive players who attempt to move forward. The player who has the ball is usually at the front of the offensive line, until the ball is passed, and the nearest defensive neighbours of the ball-holding player converge towards him until they reduce his velocity enough to bring him to a stop. There are, of course, a bunch of other rules, but I don't need those for this thought experiment.

Now, suppose that we create a very simplistic AI system from this scenario. It should be fairly easy to build such a system which emulates these movements (for the sake of this thought experiment you could even just record and playback player positions from a previous live game), and then renders them as tiny squares (for the players) and a tiny dot (for the ball). For the sake of completeness lets say the system also renders the field lines.

Now, is this simplistic system going to be any less engrossing than the live game itself?

If you would argue that the live game is much more engrossing, then I would ask what is it about the live game that appeals so much? Is it the patriotism towards your team? We can colour the squares different colours and have audience members cheer for the colour they like best. Is it watching the punch-ups and the bravado of team members coming to the aid of other team members? To that I say, how does this make us any different from the Romans in the Colosseum, cheering on for the bloody death of the gladiators? Why are we so fascinated by people mercilessly destroying their bodies and, if the literature serves me correctly, their minds as well? The square-dot game would eliminate such messy bloodsports, and remove the need to pay extravagant salaries to the players, while providing the same level of entertainment. It's a win-win scenario (for the audience members, not the players of course).

I say, we replace all major sports competitions with the square-dot game. Maybe, in the future we'll see our descendants cheering at the television screen (or whatever it's equivalent is at that point) at a single square, trying to get it's dot past a bunch of other squares. Even more hopefully, they too will seriously consider what they're doing and say to themselves "Why in the world are we doing this?"